DARK FAMILY SECRET
AT 71 YEARS OLD, THE ACTRESS SHARES HER MOST SHOCKING TRAGEDY
Charlotte Rampling tells all
Charlotte Rampling comes to the door of her Paris flat, businesslike in charcoal trousers and a grey shirt. She is smaller in person and ramrod straight as she leads us into a sitting room strewn with oriental rugs. Classical music emanates softly from an invisible sound system.
Younger readers might know Charlotte (71) as the cranky lawyer from the TVNZ 1 crime drama Broadchurch, now back (without Charlotte) for a third series. But for a generation, she was the ultimate pin-up and sex symbol.
We had expected cats – she has been living alone with two of them since the death of her longtime fiancé in October 2015 – but apparently they have gone into hiding. “They don’t like people coming into their home,” she explains. “They are completely anti-social. When the family came for Christmas, they went upstairs and never came down.”
A style icon and muse to directors and photographers, she has appeared in more films than you can shake an Oscar at, and at an age when many of her contemporaries are either dead or long since retired, she continues to chalk up credits with the same conventiondefying panache that marked some of her greatest roles.
One of the boldest, in 1974, featured her as a concentration camp survivor in a sadomasochistic relationship with a former SS officer, played by Dirk Bogarde. The Night Porter caused such uproar that several countries banned it. Her next, The Sense of an Ending, with Jim Broadbent, was based on a Julian Barnes book. She has also recently been working with Jennifer Lawrence on a Russian spy thriller and is full of admiration for Hollywood’s highest-paid actress, whom she first met at last year’s Oscars. “She’s from a generation of these young girls who are really cool, really together, really down to earth,” she says.
The description could apply just as well to Charlotte. But she has suffered more than the odd wobble. In the ‘90s, she left the limelight and all but disappeared from view, in the grip of her demons. A deep depression had felled her. “It’s a dark, dark sickness,” she says. “You either come out or you don’t. I did, but it takes a long time.” A colonel’s daughter, she fought back and rebuilt herself, but shuns all the psychobabble: “You just live with your time and try to work out as well as you can how the f*** you survive in it.”
We begin to talk about her book, which has just been published. It is called Who I
Am, but is a world away from a conventional autobiography – it does not mention her five decades in film, but dwells instead on a tragedy that devastated her family. When Charlotte was 20, her sister Sarah committed suicide, a loss that has haunted her ever since.
The bones of the story are already known: the daughter of Godfrey Rampling, who won a gold medal in a relay at the 1936 Olympics, and Anne, a painter and heiress to the Gurteen clothing company, the actress was born in Essex, in 1946. Sarah, three years older, was “fragile” and always ill.
“She had an operation,” says Charlotte. “They said it was to do with her glands, but I never found out and I never asked. I was a baby then, anyway. And I resented her illness because it took my mother away from me.”
As “the more grounded one”, she tried to take care of her sibling, but Sarah married a wealthy Argentine rancher and moved abroad. Charlotte never saw her again: she shot herself shortly after giving birth to a son, Carlos, and is buried in Buenos Aires. Soon afterwards, Charlotte’s mother suffered a stroke and lost the power of speech. Charlotte’s father, who went on to become a NATO commander, told his wife that Sarah had died of a brain haemorrhage. He made Charlotte promise never to tell her the truth, a burden she carried for decades until her mother’s death in 2001. She does not mention it in the book, but Charlotte has never been to Argentina or to the cemetery where Sarah is buried.
“I just don’t go,” she says. “I don’t really ask myself why – I mean, one knows why – but I’m just not ready to, I don’t know...”
Nor does the book say anything about Carlos, her nephew: Charlotte tells us he is now married with three children and has taken over the family ranch. She also reveals her parents kept up a relationship with him as a child. “My mum so wanted to see Sarah’s baby. They were far away and she was so upset.” So the
‘ It’s a dark, dark sickness. You either come out or you don’t. I did, but it takes a long time’
boy’s father, also called Carlos, “sent the nanny over a few times with the baby. So we had this baby period, then my parents went to Argentina and saw him again when he was about 10. But I didn’t go.”
In the mid-1980s, when Charlotte was married to the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre, Carlos suddenly turned up in Paris. He was 18. “He literally arrived on our doorstep – ‘Hello, I’m Carlos,’“she recalls.
David, the son she had with Jean-Michel in 1977, has visited Buenos Aires and sent her a text from the cemetery, saying: “I’m sitting next to Sarah with Carlos.” He sent her pictures of the grave too. “It’s the most beautiful cemetery
I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says. “The trees especially. The trees bowing over the tombs, it was just lovely.”
Charlotte has just returned from shooting Red Sparrow in Hungary with Jennifer Lawrence. “We were all playing Russians,” she says, adopting the accent. “I run this school for spies. I train these young girls. Very in-depth manipulation. Very interesting.”
She had to fight off a bronchial infection during filming – a worrying prospect for someone who has suffered two recent bouts of pneumonia.
“It was very, very cold. You’re burning the candle at both ends. The Americans really work you hard, harder than the French or Europeans – the hours are appalling. You’ve got to be strong to do it – you can’t be ill. You can’t not do it when you’ve got 200 people waiting.”
She bristles when we bring up her depression again, to ask what brought it on. She was first treated for the illness in 1984 and later had a nervous breakdown. Then came the break-up with Jean-Michel in 1995, after he was seen booking into a hotel with another woman.
“It’s all these influences you cannot handle,” she says. “It’s too easy to say, ‘Oh yes, because the sister. Oh, her husband was leaving her, that’s why she had the depression.’” For the next five years, she took on very little work. “My forties were about
‘My forties were about dealing with that [depression]. I could only do that, more or less’